Late last year, the Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His status as a Party favourite in China and his statement comparing censorship to airport security – viewed as witty in the Chinese media and a blunder in the west – pushed him to centre stage, and rekindled the perennial debate on the relationship between politics and literature.

Pow! is his first novel to appear in English since the Nobel honour. Politics aside, this book seems to represent everything that has gone amiss in Mo Yan's work, and perhaps in a broader way what has gone awry in China's literature of the last 30 years. In the 1990s, Wang Xiaobo, a Chinese writer with millions of followers, famously stated that writing was like masturbation for him – something done out of an inexpressible urge and ending with a pleasurable emptiness. Disturbing or entertaining as the statement might sound, Mo Yan, the most prestigious writer at the moment in China, seems to have confirmed that observation. Pow! reads like public masturbation; at times laughable, in the end it reminds readers that such an act should be done in private rather than in print.

Reading Pow! reminded me of watching a traditional Chinese shadow puppet show, though in this case with lust, bloodthirstiness, torture and other sensational details splashed on to the background. Are we to be shocked, disgusted, or disturbed? Perhaps. Are we to hope for any depth in any of the characters? No. Are we to take the book seriously? Taking Mo Yan seriously seems a perfect way to deflate him. Perhaps this is a way to stay away from politics: to be a fabulist, but not to be taken so seriously.

Mo Yan, the controversial Chinese winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature, is a demented poet of the appetites. His novels have a lurid, greasy sheen.

His latest novel to be issued in English, “Pow!,” is a red-toothed fantasia about meat production and meat consumption. It may put the Western reader, at times, in mind of the nursery rhyme “Jack Sprat” (who could eat no fat), of Hansel and Gretel, of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s “Cannon Song” (“quick as winking chop him into beefsteak tartar”) and finally of Upton’s Sinclair’s exposé “The Jungle.”

But that’s our cultural baggage, not Mr. Mo’s. He is a writer who, defiantly in the face of those who wish his work were less cartoonish and more straightforward in its political meanings, continues to sing his own peculiar and alluring song.

On Oct. 11, the Chinese writer Mo Yan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and two months later his new novel, “POW!”, demonstrates for Americans why he deserved to win. It’s a vibrant, visceral novel that is both personal and political, realistic and surrealistic, funny and shocking. The explosive title cries out — “POW!” — but it is also a subtle display of narrative wizardry.

Like many of Mo Yan’s earlier novels, it is set in the poverty-stricken rural China in which he grew up. A troubled 19-year-old named Luo Xiaotong has decided to abandon his vagabond life and become a monk at a temple near his home town, Slaughterhouse Village. But before he does so, he wants to tell his life story to the wise monk who tends the temple.